Thomas Lewis Atkinson (1817-1898), after Valentine Walter Bromley (1848-1877) – Flora

Description

Valentine Walter Bromley (February 14, 1848 – April 30, 1877) was a British artist. He was born into a well-known family of artists: his grandfather, William Bromley the Younger (1769-1842), was a tint-engraver and an Associate of the Royal Academy; his great-grandfather, William Bromley the Elder, also an engraver. Valentine Bromley received his art education from his father, William Bromley (III), a member of the Institute of British Artists. At the age of nineteen, he became an Associate of the Institute of Painters in Water-Colours. A frequent art correspondent for The Illustrated London News, Bromley also worked as a book-illustrator; among other works, he illustrated Lord Dunraven’s ‘Great Divide’. Bromley died unexpectedly at the age of twenty-nine at Fallows Green, Harpenden, after undertaking an important series of illustrations of the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

Thomas Lewis Atkinson was an english engraver engaged by publisher Thomas McClean to reproduce Bromley’s feted oil painting Flora as an engraving, in a time before photographic reproduction was possible. Bromley’s original oil on canvas was painted in 1874 and auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2014 for the princely sum of £15,000.